Mácha, Petőfi, Mickiewicz

Abstract

Happy are those communities that can gather around a national figure to celebrate communal and national values. Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Burns, Dante, Scott, Petrarch, Camoes, and even Pushkin were celebrated throughout the 19th century, but in East-Central Europe few such commemorations took place, almost all of them in the last decades, for all nations of the region were under foreign, semi-colonial suppression. By the end of the 19th century, Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia became independent, and Hungary a junior partner in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The Baltic countries, Poland, Czechoslovakia, ‘Greater’ Romania, and Yugoslavia were established only in the Trianon Peace Treaty of 1920. With the exception of Macha, all East-Central European national poets considered in this article were engaged in liberating their nation, and Sandor Petőfi and Hristo Botev even died in this struggle. In contrast, Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, and others were not directly involved in any national independent movement. To celebrate such ‘national icons’ (rather than national poets) was politically unproblematic. The differences become clear if we recall the commemoration year 1859: Burns and Schiller were celebrated freely and abundantly, but it was forbidden to celebrate Petőfi in Pest or Mickiewicz in Warsaw.